My name is Jazmine Bell. I am a writer, artist and poet and I also live with Dissociative Identity Disorder and I identify as a multiple. This means that I will often write about the abuse that happened to me, this is how I process and try and heal. Please be aware that most posts will be TRIGGERING so please take care and use self-care when reading anything I write about.
I also write about my travels around the world and in life. I have been expressing myself through the arts for most of my life and have spent over 20 years studying physics, so at times I will write through the eyes of physics, as it is a field that has gone a long way in making sense of this mad world we encounter.
I live in New Zealand and I find that my surrounding deeply inspires me.
I started writing poetry as a teenager as a way to try and process circumstances in my life that made no sense to me. This led to a journey of finding painting and then I started to write more and more about my life, at first this was done in a very therapeutic way, and then I discovered a deep passion for writing and poetry.
I have been very political since I was 16 years old and New Zealand experienced its first-ever terrorism when the Rainbow Worrier ship from Greenpeace was blown up in the Auckland harbour in 1985. This led me to work for many political organizations and NGOs, I worked for Aotearoa's New Zealand Sex Worker Collective for over 10 years. I feel a deep sense of pride knowing that I helped work on New Zealand becoming the first country in the world to decriminalize prostitution.
I was drawn to working for them because I was forced into sex work as a young teenager and spent 24 years working as a sex worker as well as doing other work including working in the production side of the music industry which led to travelling around Europe and Australia with a band and working in the industry both here in New Zeland and also in London.
I had been forced by a gang into prostitution and experienced what is known as Stockholm syndrome as a result of that. For many years I struggled with addictions and was finally able to stop being a heroin addict in my mid-twenties fully.
I was conceived by rape and adopted. My first rape happened when I was 3 years old, then 13 years old and I was not believed by my family and small village and this led to me becoming a runaway. At 16 I had the horrific trauma of being gang-raped. For a long time, I felt like a had a tattoo on my forehead as many more rapes happened to me, including by a nurse at a psych hospital and also by a counsellor at a treatment centre.
Having spent many years in therapy I have gained deep insights into myself and other people, which helps me with my writing. I am dyslexic and this means grammar is a huge problem for me so there will be many mistakes in my writing as I find my way with that. As I have lived an intense life, I find it easy and endless to find things to write about.
So I hope you will follow me and join me on this journey where I talk deeply about the world of true crime as it unfolded in my life.
So touching. Thanks for sharing